Glas (book)
Encyclopedia
Glas is a 1974 book by Jacques Derrida
. It combines a reading of Hegel
's philosophical works and of Jean Genet
's autobiographical writing. "One of Derrida's more inscrutable books," its form and content invite a reflection on the nature of literary genre
and of writing.
Following the structure of Jean Genet's Ce qui est resté d'un Rembrandt déchiré en petits carrés bien réguliers, et foutu aux chiottes ["What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn Into Four Equal Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet"], the book is written in two columns in different type sizes
. The left column is about Hegel, the right column is about Genet. Each column weaves its way around quotations of all kinds, both from the works discussed and from dictionaries—Derrida's "side notes", described as "marginalia, supplementary comments, lengthy quotations, and dictionary definitions." Sometimes words are cut in half by a quotation which may last several pages. A Dutch commentator, recalling Derrida's observation that he wrote with two hands, the one commenting on the other, noted that the two-column format aims to open a space for what the individual texts excluded, in an auto-deconstructive mode.
Allan Megill described the text as a "literary-philosophical collage." Typography is an important part of the text's presentation and argument; the English translation was designed by Richard Eckersley, noted for his renderings of deconstruction
ist texts. Gregor Dotzauer, writing for Der Tagesspiegel
, argues that the two columns are explicitly phallic symbols, opposing each other in a power struggle that neither can win. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
, in a 1977 article published in Diacritics, sees a different image in the two columns, that of two legs: "As the father's phallus works in the mother's hymen, between two legs, so Glas works at origins, between two columns, between Hegel and Genet."
But as Spivak points out (since nothing in Derrida is a singular carrier of meaning), the two columns also overflow with signification—they are also architectural elements: "capital, pyramid, pillar, belfry and so on." In between those columns Derrida attempts to place his own signature. Hegel certainly is a Father to the author, and Derrida notes that his own father had died during the process of his writing Glas. Derrida's signature, the D, is found in many places: "The debris of d-words is scattered all over the pages. Derrida describes (décrit), writes d (dé-écrit), and cries d (dé-crit)." Spivak notes, "I can read Glas as a fiction of Derrida's proper name turning into a thing, of an autobiographical autotherapy or interminable self-analysis against the self-duping of self-sovereignty, crypting the signature so that it becomes impossible to spell it out."
considered the text's playfulness "exhilarating to many within the discipline [of literary criticism]", acknowledging that to others it "may prove a disadvantage". Morris Dickstein, writing for The New York Sun, called it "a dizzying commentary on the work of Hegel and Genet".
According to Jane Marie Todd, Glas is a study of literary genre
, and its seeming defiance of genre "allows this curious and challenging text [to offer] a direct contribution to literary theory: in both form and subject matter, it details a new way of viewing genre definitions." Derrida himself described the text as "a sort of a wake," in reference to James Joyce
's Finnegan's Wake
; Alan Roughley argues,
John Sturrock, reviewing the English translation of Glas for The New York Times
, commented that "as a piece of writing it has no known genre". In his estimation reading the book is "a scandalously random experience" given the problem of how to read the two printed columns—consecutively or alternately from section to section. Though it is an "exuberantly clever, punning text", it "asks too much of one's patience and intelligence; our defense against a text declaring itself to be unreadable may be to call its author's bluff and simply leave it unread." Sturrock praises the English translation (by Richard Rand and John P. Leavey Jr.), but notes that a text such as Glas by definition cannot be translated and "the notion that translation achieves a semantic identity from one language to another." Sturrock's review was severely criticized in two responses: one writer reprimanded Sturrock for a "dismissive account", another pointed out that what Sturrock refers to as a "random experience" (of the text's format) is in fact reminiscent of the "sacred texts of Judaism".
The English translation was praised by Ned Lukacher in Modern Language Notes as an "almost absolutely singular and exemplary achievement".
and Morris Dickstein, Geoffrey Hartman is heavily influenced by Glas. Luc Ferry
and Alain Renaut referred to Glas as the "quintessence of the discourse of the 'sixties", though Ned Lukacher notes that this amounts to a "a glib dismissal of Derrida's masterpiece" by restricting its scope and enclosing it as a naive text whose erasure is willed by the writing subject, whereas Lukacher maintains that "Derrida never contests that there is always a subject that decides; his point is rather that the decision never took place on the grounds the subject thought it did and that the decision has effects that the subject cannot account for." According to Lukacher, "The publication of this translation and its brilliantly assembled apparatus will have a lasting and profound impact on philosophical and literary theory in English."
Italian painter Valerio Adami
based three drawings on Glas, each called "Etude pour un dessin d'après Glas" (reprinted in his Derriere le miroir).
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...
. It combines a reading of Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.Hegel developed a comprehensive...
's philosophical works and of Jean Genet
Jean Genet
Jean Genet was a prominent and controversial French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but later took to writing...
's autobiographical writing. "One of Derrida's more inscrutable books," its form and content invite a reflection on the nature of literary genre
Literary genre
A literary genre is a category of literary composition. Genres may be determined by literary technique, tone, content, or even length. Genre should not be confused with age category, by which literature may be classified as either adult, young-adult, or children's. They also must not be confused...
and of writing.
Columns
Point (typography)
In typography, a point is the smallest unit of measure, being a subdivision of the larger pica. It is commonly abbreviated as pt. The point has long been the usual unit for measuring font size and leading and other minute items on a printed page....
. The left column is about Hegel, the right column is about Genet. Each column weaves its way around quotations of all kinds, both from the works discussed and from dictionaries—Derrida's "side notes", described as "marginalia, supplementary comments, lengthy quotations, and dictionary definitions." Sometimes words are cut in half by a quotation which may last several pages. A Dutch commentator, recalling Derrida's observation that he wrote with two hands, the one commenting on the other, noted that the two-column format aims to open a space for what the individual texts excluded, in an auto-deconstructive mode.
Allan Megill described the text as a "literary-philosophical collage." Typography is an important part of the text's presentation and argument; the English translation was designed by Richard Eckersley, noted for his renderings of deconstruction
Deconstruction
Deconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading...
ist texts. Gregor Dotzauer, writing for Der Tagesspiegel
Der Tagesspiegel
Der Tagesspiegel is a classical liberal German daily newspaper...
, argues that the two columns are explicitly phallic symbols, opposing each other in a power struggle that neither can win. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian literary critic, theorist and a University Professor at Columbia University. She is best known for the essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?", considered a founding text of postcolonialism, and for her translation of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology. She...
, in a 1977 article published in Diacritics, sees a different image in the two columns, that of two legs: "As the father's phallus works in the mother's hymen, between two legs, so Glas works at origins, between two columns, between Hegel and Genet."
But as Spivak points out (since nothing in Derrida is a singular carrier of meaning), the two columns also overflow with signification—they are also architectural elements: "capital, pyramid, pillar, belfry and so on." In between those columns Derrida attempts to place his own signature. Hegel certainly is a Father to the author, and Derrida notes that his own father had died during the process of his writing Glas. Derrida's signature, the D, is found in many places: "The debris of d-words is scattered all over the pages. Derrida describes (décrit), writes d (dé-écrit), and cries d (dé-crit)." Spivak notes, "I can read Glas as a fiction of Derrida's proper name turning into a thing, of an autobiographical autotherapy or interminable self-analysis against the self-duping of self-sovereignty, crypting the signature so that it becomes impossible to spell it out."
Autobiography and the signature
The specific literary genre problematized in Glas is autobiography, and its inquiry traces the very concept of the signature, which in autobiography marks the identity of the author with the narrator of the text. Following Plato, Derrida sees the relation between author and text as one of filiation, but unlike Plato's idea of filiation, which involves only the father and the child, for Derrida author alternates between the father and the mother of the text. In this relationship, the author's signature becomes the guarantor of the text's truth, "it becomes its surrogate parent," according to Jane Marie Todd. The Genet column discusses his autobiographical writings, where one of the issues is Genet's very name—it is not that of his father, but of his mother, who abandoned him shortly after birth. According to Todd, "in the mother who abandons her bastard child, leaving only her name, Derrida finds a figure for the author/text/signature relationship."Critical response
Glas is described as experimental and obscure. Literary theorist Geoffrey HartmanGeoffrey Hartman
Geoffrey H. Hartman is a German-born American literary theorist, sometimes identified with the Yale School of deconstruction, but also has written on a wide range of subjects, and cannot be categorized by a single school or method.-Biography:...
considered the text's playfulness "exhilarating to many within the discipline [of literary criticism]", acknowledging that to others it "may prove a disadvantage". Morris Dickstein, writing for The New York Sun, called it "a dizzying commentary on the work of Hegel and Genet".
According to Jane Marie Todd, Glas is a study of literary genre
Literary genre
A literary genre is a category of literary composition. Genres may be determined by literary technique, tone, content, or even length. Genre should not be confused with age category, by which literature may be classified as either adult, young-adult, or children's. They also must not be confused...
, and its seeming defiance of genre "allows this curious and challenging text [to offer] a direct contribution to literary theory: in both form and subject matter, it details a new way of viewing genre definitions." Derrida himself described the text as "a sort of a wake," in reference to James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
's Finnegan's Wake
Finnegan's Wake
"Finnegan's Wake" is a ballad that arose in the 1850s in the music-hall tradition of comical Irish songs. The song is a staple of the Irish folk-music group, The Dubliners, who have played it on many occasions and included it on several albums, and is especially well known to fans of The Clancy...
; Alan Roughley argues,
It is clear that his reading of Joyce's text haunts the way in which Derrida has constructed his exploration of Hegel and Genet by positioning separate and discrete textual columns next to each other so that it is necessary to read intertextually and follow the ways in which the textual play operates across and between the margins or borders of the page(s) and space(s) separating the columns.
John Sturrock, reviewing the English translation of Glas for The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, commented that "as a piece of writing it has no known genre". In his estimation reading the book is "a scandalously random experience" given the problem of how to read the two printed columns—consecutively or alternately from section to section. Though it is an "exuberantly clever, punning text", it "asks too much of one's patience and intelligence; our defense against a text declaring itself to be unreadable may be to call its author's bluff and simply leave it unread." Sturrock praises the English translation (by Richard Rand and John P. Leavey Jr.), but notes that a text such as Glas by definition cannot be translated and "the notion that translation achieves a semantic identity from one language to another." Sturrock's review was severely criticized in two responses: one writer reprimanded Sturrock for a "dismissive account", another pointed out that what Sturrock refers to as a "random experience" (of the text's format) is in fact reminiscent of the "sacred texts of Judaism".
The English translation was praised by Ned Lukacher in Modern Language Notes as an "almost absolutely singular and exemplary achievement".
Influence
According to Denis DonoghueDenis Donoghue
Denis Donoghue is an Irish literary critic. He is currently the Henry James Chair of English and American Letters at New York University....
and Morris Dickstein, Geoffrey Hartman is heavily influenced by Glas. Luc Ferry
Luc Ferry
Luc Ferry is a French philosopher and a notable proponent of Secular Humanism. He is a former member of the Saint-Simon Foundation think-tank....
and Alain Renaut referred to Glas as the "quintessence of the discourse of the 'sixties", though Ned Lukacher notes that this amounts to a "a glib dismissal of Derrida's masterpiece" by restricting its scope and enclosing it as a naive text whose erasure is willed by the writing subject, whereas Lukacher maintains that "Derrida never contests that there is always a subject that decides; his point is rather that the decision never took place on the grounds the subject thought it did and that the decision has effects that the subject cannot account for." According to Lukacher, "The publication of this translation and its brilliantly assembled apparatus will have a lasting and profound impact on philosophical and literary theory in English."
Italian painter Valerio Adami
Valerio Adami
Valerio Adami is an Italian painter. Educated at the Accademia di Brera in Milan, he has since worked in both London and Paris. His art is influenced by Pop Art....
based three drawings on Glas, each called "Etude pour un dessin d'après Glas" (reprinted in his Derriere le miroir).
Editions
- Jacques Derrida, Glas, (Paris: Galilée, 1974)
- Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. & Richard Rand (Lincoln & London: U of Nebraska P, 1986)
- The English translation was accompanied by a companion volume, Glassary, by John P. Leavey (U of Nebraska P, 1986) with an introduction by Gregory L. Ulmer and a preface by Derrida
External links
- Extracts from Glas (MS Word document format)